Two Slashes

It’s been three months since I last reviewed a game for my BGS “series” (I put it in quotes because you can’t really call something a series if you’ve neglected to do it for a quarter of a year).  Oops.

Anyway, I found Snapshot Adventures:  Secret of Bird Island at Big Lots and decided that, with a price tag of just $4, it would be something reasonable to review and then set aside, and that I really wouldn’t be wasting anything in doing so.  When I posted a picture of the game box to Twitter, the responses I got (all two of them) were mixed.

When I finally opened and installed the game, I was expecting something along the lines of a Pokémon Snap game.  I wasn’t disappointed in that respect from a concept standpoint, though the implementation is far from fun.

The game itself is rather wacky in that it only runs at an 800×600 resolution, which caused a few problems for me with the game being weirdly cropped (until I managed to come across a “widescreen” option in the options menu; this is the first time I’ve seen a game get cropped rather than scaled) and blank screens happening from time to time.  Despite the fact that I’m running a PC that can churn through Team Fortress 2 without breaking a sweat, I was also a little concerned that the game startup took much longer despite the game itself being tiny and designed to run on the PCs of yester-decade.

The back-story the game provides is as perplexing as why I thought this would be a good game in the first place.  The game asks you for your name, then quickly tries to lure you in by saying that your grandfather died and that you eventually happen across his old camera and a mysterious journal entry that you (well, the “you” in the game) want to investigate.

She looks thoroughly convinced that I'm a great photographer, doesn't she?

In order to solve the mystery, you have to take pictures for some of your grandfather’s friends that all seem to end up on the covers of regional ornithology journals.  For someone who happened upon the camera only a few minutes ago, that’s quite a feat.

Of course, the game also takes a draw from Ian Fleming’s James Bond series and coughs up random gadgets for you along the way, including “magic” bird seed, a model airplane that seems to cause birds to fly, and (my favorite) the “electronic satellite-based bird identification system” (which simply tells you what bird you’re about to take a picture of, even though the game will tell you what to look for in the corner of the screen).

To go along with the questionable story (which I left halfway through because I couldn’t tolerate it) and the overuse of Comic Sans is the create-a-bird mode, which the game won’t even let you check out until after you’ve played through some of the story.  I was confused as to the presence of create-a-bird mode, especially the fact that you can upload your designs to the Internet (and download others, obviously), as the game seems quite adept at making what you design look more like a winged fish than a bird.

If birdwatching is one of your interests and you would love nothing better than to spend all day “taking pictures” of birds, I suggest you go find yourself a cheap digital camera and actually go out and do it.  This game is a poor substitute for anything, including entertainment, and I highly suggest mass burnings (of the fire kind, not the CD-R kind) of this game.

Now to go find a cure for my boredom…